Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Networked Society: Its Power and Impact

We began looking at the way network society would have treated Hitler, but after working on the project it seemed like there were some better historical events that would have been changed by networked media. Please click here to view the video.In case you were really looking forward to some Hitler clips, here are some clips that didn't make the final piece.

The following infographic details the impact that networked society had in the recent Arab Spring uprising. You will be able to see that the public's reliance on social media for information, communication and as a general catalyst for the movement is on the rise, while faith in traditional media and means of information sharing has its weaknesses.

The following infographic details what life would have been like had our current networked society and means of communication had been available at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. You can see the number of options which would have been able for those afflicted by the disaster. Not only would have the proper authorities have been able to offer more outlets and means of communicating information to the public, but the public itself would have had more avenues to express their emotions, assistance, etc. These channels could have been used advantageously by the public to feed information to the mass media centers which may not have been able to gather said information on their own, or at least without a heightened amount of effort. (For a larger image, click here.)

As evidenced by the preceeding videos and infographics, networked culture has both the potential to help, such as two-way communication and information exchange between the public and societal institutions in times of crisis, or to be an unnecessary nuisance leading to such acts as of privacy and witch-hunts into public personas.